Stick a Fork in This After-Dinner Toast, It's Done!

Credit: Condé Nast ArchiveOne of my favorite words to hear at the dinner table is “cheers.” It’s a universal sentiment that honors good fellowship among both men and women, and invariably extends the welcome promise of a savored drink. In patrician households, it carries an even deeper assurance: the guarantee that a protracted and oftentimes numbing toast has finally come to its end.

Let me use my meal on Thanksgiving with old family friends as an example. Just as everyone was finishing the main course, the most senior and well-bred among us, if not the most functional and well-adjusted, rose from his seat to share a few remarks.

As is the custom, the chime of silver striking crystal silenced the room and fixed the gaze of all the guests on the elderly speaker. He started with a story about death, the tragic burning in a fire of an aged couple too frail to escape the violent flames of a blaze that consumed their home in Palm Beach. From there, the topic shifted to Yale in the late 1950s, where the first female ever to teach a course at the university lectured on Chinese history, which was especially confusing for students, I learned, because everything sounded like Ling and Ting or Li and Chi, and remembering all the similar names was near to impossible. Then there was a lengthy description of childhood memories, specifically unhappy ones caused by critical parents whose marriage was suffering as a result of the husband’s extended liaison with another woman, someone more glamorous, no less, who, among other things, could boast of holding a close relation to the author of the seminal American novel The Virginian. Next were the wistful recollections of days spent at boarding school in New England, when times were so carefree that young men worried only about the unrelenting winter snows that occasionally prevented local coachmen from clearing the ice hockey ponds with rudimentary horse drawn plows.

It was subsequently explained that summertime also offered a certain variety of halcyon pleasure. Gathering with relatives at the family beach house in Martha’s Vineyard was a treasured holiday ritual, that is, until spending all those long, idle hours under the same roof again inflamed tensions and inspired a new set of bitter feuds. Summer school at Columbia University, it was faithfully reported, provided a convenient excuse for leaving the island retreat, but it failed to suddenly inspire an appetite for learning. Often the commute to class, which required a car trip from the suburbs to Manhattan, ended at the parking meter on Broadway, where the driver would sleep through his classes before heading home without having read or written so much as a sentence from morning till night. Fortunately, at this point in the festivities, the tireless spokesman was unable to continue, as the long-delayed serving of dessert offered weary listeners a brief respite. But the hiatus lasted only for the fleeting moment it took to launch hardily into the second phase of the holiday peroration.

It must be easy for many to wonder how such a meandering narrative could possible qualify as a Thanksgiving toast. Well, a gifted orator might have put it all into an aphoristic capsule when he fêted the assembled guests, but it’s a fact of life among the wealthy that motto “less is more” is rarely observed, especially when drinks are at hand and a captive audience of family and close friends are nearby.